Lots of pages but little with text content

Should I care doing all pages?

Macguru

I came across this new site with about 20 decent pages with good text content. All other pages (+ 150) are with a main jpg of the products and nav gifs burried in nested tables and no text at all.

Will my client benefit of anything you know if I make a balanced and relevant use keywords in titles, descriptions, filenames, alt and comments here and there?

4eyes

1:54 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

I think so MacGuru.

I have a client with a 200 page site. Many of his pages are simply an image, some with a bit of text describing the particular product on that page, some without.

Before I took over the site, none of these pages had proper titles, keywords or descriptions. All I did was give them individual titles with the product name + info and added a generic description for each product category.

That was the only optimisation I did, but the hits to the site increased dramatically. Every page is found 1 or 2 on Google for the product name and many are found for the generic description. Over half the traffic now comes from these 'simple' pages. In this case it is because none of his competitors could be bothered to correctly title 180+ individual product pages.

Well worth doing for him.

Depending on the market, it might be worth adding a generic summary, (sort of 'byline'), to the bottom of each page just to get a bit of text on there.

[added] Forgot to say, the site structure is such that every 'simple' page has a text link coming to it with the main key phrase for that page. I think that the link and having a correct title are often enough for this type of page.

Macguru

2:09 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

4eyes, Your reply is very encouraging! For the time it takes to do this for each page, I think it is very profitable.

Just another question: Does any think that using the main keyword in different zones for those "empty" pages will reinforce the theme of the site? Did the "ordinary" pages did any better by this technique after a while?

[added too] Ok, main nav is with rollover gifs all over the site. Should I use hallway pages for the text links??

Robert Charlton

3:35 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

>>Ok, main nav is with rollover gifs all over the site. Should I use hallway pages for the text links??<<

I can't comment on the hallway page, but I do use text links on the bottom of every page. I think this is good navigation practice anyway, and it certainly helps in search.

I recently ran an experiment on a client's site, where they didn't think it would matter if they changed a few words of my copy here and there ;)... including the text links. Rankings were dismal. Instead of changing it back all at once, I decided to do it in steps, to see how individual components helped (on Google). The first step was fixing the text links only... and I can say that just including part of the target phrase (eg, "widgets" as part of "red widgets") in the global text links has jumped the page from #34 to #3.

ken_b

4:51 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

Hmmmm.... I've been wondering about this. I have maybe 1,000 pages that have a generic title (if any). The are all just a photo with a one line description.

Looks like maybe I should go back and properly title them.

Would it be effective if I just copy/paste the description as the page title?

Macguru

5:04 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

Hi ken_b,

I did not have the occasion to welcome you to WebmasterWorld. I hope you like this place, tons of info.

>I just copy/paste the description as the page title?

Funny you ask this question, I did the same a couple of days ago. I used the "site search" feature (top menu) to get the thread back. Here it is: [webmasterworld.com...]

4eyes

5:07 pm on Oct 13, 2001 (gmt 0)

I would guess so. Although it would help if there was a generic description in there somewhere